“Amsterdam” (M) *** and a half

THE opening titles for David O Russell’s somewhat large (134 minutes) film claims that “a lot of this really happened”. “A lot” is relative. 

“Amsterdam” starts with World War I, a nasty introduction to a new kind of warfare. In that war, and in its successor that is about to kick off when it ends, US troops arrived late. After battlefield and military hospital sequences, the story proper begins in Amsterdam where Burt (Christian Bale), a doctor with a glass eye and a soft spot for fellow veterans; his regimental companion, soldier Harold (John David Washington) and Valerie (Margot Robbie), a nurse with a talent for making small sculptures from shrapnel, leave recuperation and start going about family stuff and doing good.

The film’s ultimate dramatic element develops through a plot to overthrow the US government and install a dictator willing to embrace fascist ideals – apparently, this did actually happen.

The film takes its time getting around to it, exercising our patience, or perhaps our endurance, for an hour in which the principal characters develop their friendship before getting to the story it really intends to tell.

With a tighter script, “Amsterdam” could have spent less time telling about the principal trio’s meandering through superfluous commentary about how they spent the interbellum period.

Be patient. Playing a no-nonsense retired general, Robert De Niro energises the film sufficiently to enable writer/director Russell to wind it up before World War II kicked off – as history now tells us, more than two years before Uncle Sam got into it.

At all cinemas

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